Apr 30, 2013

We’ve got a lot of grounds to cover

Posted at 10:26 pm by David Bradley  

Next time you’re sipping on your skinny, frothy mochachocafrappalatteccino with maple syrup and cinnamon at the local Costabucksorthree coffee shop and surfing on their EasyHack(TM) wireless internet spare a thought for the grounds. The burnt out and scalded fragments of beans gone by that in this household are recycled via the compost bins but on the industrial scale represent an international commodity waste product you might not at first appreciate but represents a truly pressing …

Apr 24, 2013

Pale Blue Dot

Posted at 9:12 pm by David Bradley  

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft (launched 1977) when it reached 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) from Earth in 1990. In the photograph, Earth is shown as a tiny dot (0.12 pixel in size) against the vastness of space. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had …

Apr 17, 2013

Getting the garlic blues

Posted at 4:25 pm by David Bradley  

Pickler Andrew Dalby responded to one of my recent tweets about not cooking asparagus in lemon juice because it discolours it. He had found that his garlic cloves turned blue when he pickled them in spiced malt vinegar. The discolouration doesn’t mean that the pickles are inedible.

Now plant material turning blue in acid (vinegar is weak acetic acid) …